This not being a history of Cape Colony, but rather of what the sailor will find at or near its ports and harbours, the writer is relieved from any necessity of treating on past or present troubles with the Boers or the natives. Of course, everything was tinted _couleur de rose_ at the Prince’s visit, albeit at that very time the colony was in a bad way, with over speculation among the commercial classes, a cattle plague, disease among sheep, and a grape-disease. Mr. Frederick Boyle, whose recent work on the Diamond-fields has been already quoted, and who had to leave a steamer short of coal at Saldanha Bay, seventy or eighty miles from Cape Town, and proceed by a rather expensive route, presents a picture far from gratifying of some of the districts through which he passed. At Saldanha Bay agriculture gave such poor returns that it did not even pay to export produce to the Cape. The settlers _exist_, but can hardly be said to live. They have plenty of cattle and sheep, sufficient maize and corn, but little money. Mr. Boyle describes the homestead of a Boer substantially as follows:— Reaching the home of a farmer named Vasson, he found himself in the midst of a scene quite patriarchal. All the plain before the house was white with sheep and lambs, drinking at the “dam” or in long troughs. The dam is an indispensable institution in a country where springs are scarce, and where a river is a prodigy. It is the new settler’s first work, even before erecting his house, to find a hollow space, and dam it up, so as to make a reservoir. He then proceeds to make the best sun-dried bricks he can, and to erect his cottage, usually of two, and rarely more than three, rooms. Not unfrequently, there is a garden, hardly worthy of the name, where a few potatoes and onions are raised. The farmers, more especially the Dutch, are “the heaviest and largest in the world.” At an early age their drowsy habits and copious feeding run them into flesh. “Three times a day the family gorges itself upon lumps of mutton, fried in the tallowy fat of the sheep’s tail, or else—their only change of diet—upon the tasteless _fricadel_—kneaded balls of meat and onions, likewise swimming in grease. Very few vegetables they have, and those are rarely used. Brown bread they make, but scarcely touch it. Fancy existing from birth to death upon mutton scraps, half boiled, half fried, in tallow! So doth the Boer. It is not eating, but devouring, with him. And fancy the existence! always alone with one’s father, mother, brothers, and sisters; of whom not one can do more than write his name, scarce one can read, not one has heard of any event in history, nor dreamed of such existing things as art or science, or poetry, or aught that pertains to civilisation.” An unpleasant picture, truly, and one to which there are many exceptions. It was doubtful whether Mr. Vasson could read. His farm was several thousand acres. The ancient law of Cape Colony gave the settler 3,000